Making Indigenous Archaeology Indigenous: Will it ever happen?

I began my working life in Australian archaeology in late 1976, some four years after the Australian Archaeological Association had been formed. Over the following four years I was employed by the Aboriginal Sites Department, Western Australian Museum, where I undertook Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA)—mostly in the Pilbara region—and documented Indigenous heritage places across WA for the Australian Heritage Commission’s nascent Register of the National Estate. At the end of that time I had come to the view that I, a white archaeologist, would not be working in Indigenous archaeology and heritage management after a further five years or so because that work would be led by, done by, and controlled by Traditional Owners and their communities. This view aligned with a potent sense of optimism in the latter years of the 1970s concerning real change with respect to Indigenous rights and self-determination.

Some 40-years on things have changed. Nevertheless, despite goodwill and good intentions by many in the field of archaeology and beyond, I believe we are only marginally closer to establishing a system of Indigenous control of Australian Indigenous archaeology than we were in the early 1980s. Why is this the case? In this short contribution I reflect on barriers to this happening before considering where Indigenous archaeology and Indigenous control might go in the next 50-years. While I am concerned that things may get worse rather than better, I argue that archaeology will never shake off the shackles of its colonial foundations while scientific significance is deemed to be of higher or equal order to Indigenous social value alongside respect for Indigenous rights and responsibility for Country.

By way of framing I use the case of NSW to briefly background more than 50-years of archaeology and heritage practice (drawing from Brown 2016; Byrne et al. 2001). When the National Parks and Wildlife Amendment Act 1969 was adopted by the NSW State Parliament, it made reference to ‘Aboriginal relics’ and established a ‘materialist view’ of Aboriginal heritage. It did not mention Aboriginal people nor recognise rights that they might hold to determine the meanings and future of ‘their’ heritage. From this low base, things changed markedly in the 1970s. A Cultural Heritage Section, responsible for Indigenous heritage, was established in 1971 within the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service; legislation introduced in 1974 recognised ‘Aboriginal Places’ (i.e. places of special significance with respect to Aboriginal culture); Aboriginal representatives were appointed to committees advising government on heritage; and a Sites of Significance Survey Program was created (1973–1984). The objective of this Program was to document and register places valued by contemporary Aboriginal communities. The survey team was made up entirely of Aboriginal people, bar its anthropologist. It marked the entry of Aboriginal people into the field of governmental heritage management. These changes, echoed across different parts of Australia, inspired my late-1970s optimism for an Aboriginal-controlled heritage system.

From the 1980s, the EIA process increasingly dominated the Aboriginal heritage management field in NSW. The heritage consulting industry increasingly became a system dominated by archaeologists rather than Indigenous community members. It saw developers engage archaeologists in roles that included ‘consultation’ with Indigenous groups—a process that typically took the form of Aboriginal people assisting in the work of archaeology. Consequently, contemporary Indigenous knowledge (‘social value’) became excluded from the EIA process, the oral history approach (pioneered by the Sites of Significance Survey Program) was largely discarded, and the recording of Aboriginal post-AD 1788 places virtually ceased. It is important to note that archaeologists did not solely create this situation and many archaeologists shared their skills with Aboriginal people and were passionate in their efforts to protect Aboriginal heritage. The spectre of colonial and neo-colonial history, politics and racism, development and progress were also factors.

In 2010, the NSW Constitution was amended to acknowledge and honour Aboriginal people as the State’s first people and nations. In the same year, the NSW Labor Government committed to the development of stand-alone Aboriginal cultural heritage legislation. This commitment, supported by both major parties in the then NSW State Parliament, was a response to calls from Aboriginal people to remove Aboriginal heritage management provisions from the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974. These provisions, it was argued, equated Aboriginal people with the plants and animals of NSW, echoing colonial constructions of Aboriginal people as part of the faunal assemblage of the State. Thus, in 2010, Aboriginal communities and the Parliament were of the same opinion: separate Aboriginal heritage legislation was a necessary and powerful anti-colonial symbol and could be an empowering action.

Thirteen years on there is no stand-alone Aboriginal heritage legislation in NSW. My view is that this situation is a result of: a failure to conceptualise the nature of NSW’s Aboriginal heritage (i.e. ‘sites’ versus Country); poorly framed and implemented consultation processes; government-engineered and promoted conflicts between an Aboriginal Local Land Council system (established in 1983) versus a Traditional Owner model; and a pervasive attitude of anti-intellectualism. Whatever benefits new legislation might bring, I’m certain that Aboriginal control of Aboriginal heritage will not be happening in NSW anytime soon.

So, having reached this point of pessimism, what are the prospects of a future system—both in NSW and across Australia—for an Indigenous heritage system controlled by Indigenous rights-holders?

There are many concerns tied into this question, not least of all Indigenous rights as inscribed in the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (to which Australia has been a signatory since 2009) and the focus of reconciliation work on ‘Voice-Treaty-Truth’ and sovereignty. Given the audience for this short contribution, I focus on the roles archaeologists, and heritage professionals more generally, can take in challenging the heritage system and demanding an Indigenous-led and -controlled Indigenous heritage system. In brief, I advocate for a heritage system that recognises archaeological (or scientific) significance as a subset of (and neither separate from nor equivalent to) ‘social value’ (a position argued by Denis Byrne in the early 2000s). All archaeologists can implement such a shift in their practice.

The Australia ICOMOS Burra Charter (2013), first adopted in 1979, has been pre-eminent in establishing a values-based approach to identifying, documenting, assessing, protecting, and managing heritage places of significance. It has promoted the definition of cultural significance as meaning ‘aesthetic, historic, scientific, social or spiritual value for past, present or future generations’. In the field of Australian archaeology, archaeological significance has, since the early 1980s, become aligned with ‘scientific significance’; and, as noted previously, this has been at the expense of social significance. What if this situation were to be reversed?

First, this would result in a radical restructuring of the Australian Indigenous heritage system. For a start, Indigenous social value would encompasse the significance of Country to contemporary communities, and include people’s sense of identity, belonging, and sense-of-place, as well as forms of spiritual connection. Such value could only be determined by Indigenous peoples and communities because it is created by those communities through their knowledges, experiences, and practices. Indigenous people have the expertise to document and assess Indigenous heritage values and, importantly, identify associated wellbeing benefits for their communities.

In this situation, archaeological value would be constructed as a subset of Indigenous-held social values related to Country. I think it is safe to assume, after decades of Indigenous groups working with archaeologists across Australia, that Aboriginal people have a good idea of what archaeologists do and what the profession (even with individual diversity) considers to be ‘research value’ and/or ‘representative’. That is, Indigenous communities could decide whether or not the advice and input of archaeologists (Indigenous or not) is required.

Going further, the EIS process could be restructured in such a way that developers do not engage heritage consultant companies dominated by non-Indigenous employees, but rather that each Indigenous community whose Country or community might be impacted by a development is directly engaged by the developer. I can see this already happening; for example, Yulur Heritage, a company established by Wintawari Guruma Aboriginal Corporation to provide heritage consultancy services. Equally, as I have often banged-on about, the impact assessment system should be reversed. That is, all of Indigenous Country should be recognised as significant. Full stop. Thus, the EIS process would become a negotiation concerned with measuring the extent and degree of potential harm and then either mitigating impacts and/or agreeing on compensation for losses to present and future generations.

Archaeologists have the power to influence ways of working whereby Indigenous owners actually take the lead on Caring for Country. Yikes! I feel a ripple of optimism returning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.